Durbar (27 page)

‘No. In the bazaar asking questions?’

‘What sort of questions?’

‘They want to be sure they know how many men are inside and how well they are prepared,’ he said softly, continuing to pour milk from one jug into another.

‘Are they prepared?’ I asked looking into my glass of steaming hot tea.

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know that there is that General inside helping the Sant set up barricades. And all night these trucks go into the temple. They are filled with guns and rockets.’

‘How come nobody stops them?’

‘Who will? The police don’t dare go into the temple.’

Just then a group of young Sikh men walked in, laughing and talking loudly. The teashop owner rushed to serve them. They wore saffron turbans, long blue kurtas and short white pants, and they carried machine guns. They ordered glasses of banafsha, hot milk flavoured with an aromatic herb. Bhindranwale thought of tea as an intoxicant and all intoxicants were forbidden in his army. The men were in their early twenties, tall and well built. They looked suspiciously at Sandeep and me as they sat down, and I decided it would be prudent to identify ourselves.

‘Sat sri akal.’

‘Sat sri akal.’

‘I am a reporter from Delhi. We are here because we heard there is going to be an attack on the Durbar Sahib.’

They laughed. ‘Yes. We’ve heard that too, but by the grace of Guru Govind Singh we are fully prepared.’ They held up their guns.

‘Prepared to take on the Indian Army?’ I asked the question, knowing that as Sikhs they would have grown up with deep respect for the army.

‘Ready to take on any troops that the Hindu leaders in Delhi send,’ said a tall, good-looking young man with a glint of laughter in his hazel eyes.

‘Do you all come from the same village?’

‘We come from the same army. We are all the children of Guru Govind Singh.’ They laughed.

‘Do you live in the Golden Temple?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Before you came here…to the temple…what work did you do?’

‘We were in college,’ one of them said, ‘but why do you ask so many questions?’

‘I’m a reporter.’

‘You ask too many questions even for a reporter.’ They laughed again, drank their milk and left without paying.

Inside the temple the crowds were larger than usual confirming that rumours of a possible attack that day were hugely exaggerated. Recitations from the Guru Granth Sahib drifted from a loudspeaker and the rich, rancid smell of ghee filled the air. We walked down the white marble steps that led to the white marble concourse around the temple’s sacred pond. The light was blindingly white and I had to cover my eyes with my dupatta.
The temple floated like a gold box on the glistening water of the pond. The chanting from inside grew louder. We joined a queue of pilgrims as they muttered and genuflected their way to the temple. I looked for fortifications and Sandeep, a white handkerchief covering his head, took pictures as unobtrusively as possible.

When we got close to a set of rooms we knew to be the offices of Bhindranwale’s spokesmen, we stopped to see if we could find someone to talk to. The offices were closed, which was unusual, but more unusual was the sight of several young men climbing down a flight of stairs that led to the temple’s labyrinth of underground rooms where grain and other supplies were stored. They carried large jute sacks that could have contained food grain or guns.

The middle-aged man supervising the operation was small and wiry, with a long, sad face and a straggly white beard. I recognized him as Major General Shabeg Singh from a picture I had seen in a newspaper. I had been trying to interview him for weeks but had not managed because he avoided reporters. I knew he was bitter about the way he had been treated by the Indian Army and that he was helping Bhindranwale train his troops for a possible assault on the Golden Temple. He had said as much in the only known interview he had given till then. It appeared obscurely in a Delhi magazine or newspaper without being given the prominence it deserved. Not many people knew, then, that Bhindranwale’s army was being led by a General who was the real hero of the Bangladesh war without ever having received sufficient credit for this.

‘Sat sri akal.’ I used the Sikh greeting in the hope that he would agree to an interview to a fellow Sikh.

‘Sat sri akal,’ he replied.

‘What are you building?’

‘Fortifications.’ He used the Punjabi word. Morcha.

I switched to English. ‘What for?’

‘To face the army. We can easily take on the police and the paramilitary but we hear that Mrs Gandhi plans to use the army in which case we need to be better prepared than we were.’ He said this in fluent English.

‘Is an attack imminent?’

‘I don’t know…you tell me. You’ve just come from Delhi, haven’t you? You should know more about when it’s going to happen. Aren’t you here because you’re expecting an attack any moment?’

‘Yes.’ It seemed pointless to lie.

‘So?’

‘So, I’d like very much to talk to you.’

‘Not just now,’ he said, ‘but I will be in my room in the Guru Ramdas Serai in an hour and we can talk then.’

‘I’ll be there.’

The General’s room was on the first floor. Its single door opened on to a narrow veranda that overlooked the inner courtyard of the building and its small window had an angular view of the Golden Temple. Through it came the constant murmur of Sikh prayers. The tiny room’s walls were painted green. Between two narrow beds stood a small wooden table on which there were several bottles of medicine. The General explained that both he and his wife had serious health problems.

‘Do you live here all the time?’

‘No. But I have been living here for a while to offer prayers after winning my cases against the Indian Army.’

‘I’ve heard that you were treated unfairly by the army but I don’t know much more than that.’

‘“Unfairly” is the wrong word for what the army did to me,’ he retorted angrily. ‘I don’t think any army in the world would do to a war hero what the Indian Army did to me. If it weren’t for me there would have been no Mukti Bahini and if there were no Mukti Bahini there may not have been a Bangladesh.’

Mukti Bahini was the name given to the Bangladeshi resistance which, as the General confirmed, may not have won freedom for Bangladesh or offered much resistance without help from the Indian Army. The war for Bangladesh’s liberation started as an indigenous movement after hundreds of thousands of Bengali muslims were massacred by the Pakistani army in what was then East Pakistan. In Bangladesh there are many who believe that more than a million people were killed. Students, university professors, writers, politicians, doctors, teachers, lawyers. More than ten million Bengalis fled across the Indian border after the massacres. They lived for nearly a year in squalid refugee camps forcing India to act. Before sending Indian troops to ‘liberate’ the Bengali half of Pakistan the Indian Army strengthened the Mukti Bahini by filling its ranks with regular Indian troops, in freedom fighter guise.

In the one conversation I had with the General in his room in the Guru Ramdas Serai that afternoon, he told me with considerable pride how he had transformed the Mukti Bahini from a ragtag bunch of volunteer fighters into a formidable military force. Before the Indian Army officially intervened to create Bangladesh it was the Mukti Bahini that took on Pakistani troops through sabotage and sneak attacks.

‘I was decorated for what I did for the country and what does the country do for me? What does the army do? They trump up corruption charges, so flimsy they were thrown out of court, and the Army Chief dismisses me from the army dishonourably a day before I am due to retire. That means I get no pension.’

‘Why? What were the charges?’

‘I was building a house in Dehra Dun,’ he said bitterly, ‘and to save a little money I used army trucks to transport building materials. Is that such a crime? From this they tried to make out that I had been stealing supplies from the army and god only knows what else, and this man who is your Army Chief now – he was responsible.’ The Army Chief he spoke of had retired by then.

‘What happened after they threw you out?’

‘I took the army to court and by the grace of god won all my cases, so I came here to give thanks. One night when I was asleep in the Guru Ramdas Serai someone came and woke me and said that the Sant would like to see me, so I went. He told me he wanted to create a separate country for the Sikhs, Khalistan, and asked if I would help. I told him I would help willingly and I have been here in the temple ever since.’

‘But there’s no way that you can take on the Indian Army and win,’ I said hesitantly.

‘If we cannot win, we can at least die giving them a good fight.’

‘When are you expecting the attack?’

‘Any time. Maybe even tonight.’

‘But the temple is full of pilgrims.’

‘So what? Do you think they care? Do you think Mrs Gandhi cares about anything other than ensuring that the throne of Delhi passes to her son and grandson? You’re a Sikh, aren’t you? You should be on our side. Why should you want to live in a country in which there is no justice and in which Sikhs are second-class citizens?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Look at what happened to me. Do you think this would have happened to a Hindu General? Never. They’ve caught senior officers for corruption, dereliction of duty, cowardice under fire, spying – all sorts of things. Nothing ever happens to them. They don’t get thrown out without a pension.’

He fell silent and I asked if he would consider giving up his war against the Indian government if justice were done even at this late stage. He shook his head and said it was too late. The war had already started, he said, but I thought I detected a moment of uncertainty and resolved that if the temple did not come under attack that night I would go back to Delhi and tell Rajiv about my conversation. Rajiv was only a general secretary in the Congress Party at the time but I knew that his mother consulted him on most things and took what he had to say seriously. Maybe there was still the possibility of a solution that was political and not military.

That afternoon, I met Bhindranwale for the last time.

He was holding court on the roof of the
langar
or kitchen building. His audience consisted entirely of noisy young men who carried automatic weapons and shouted angry slogans. There were no pilgrims in this gathering. Its purpose seemed to be to rally the troops. Sandeep and I stumbled upon it because as was usual on all our visits to the Golden Temple we went looking for the Sant. He was already giving a speech when we arrived so we went and stood at the back behind the noisy young men. Since this was some distance from where the Sant sat with his lieutenants I did not think he had seen us. But perhaps my glittery evening clothes and the fact that I was the only woman there made me conspicuous because to my horror I heard him stop in the middle of his speech and summon me.

‘Bibi, come here please,’ he said as a hush descended over the gathering.

‘Me?’ I asked in the hope that I had heard wrong.

‘Yes.’ There was no choice but to do as he commanded. I noticed that Sandeep looked very nervous and had stopped taking pictures.

When I got to where Bhindranwale sat he stood up and raising his voice asked, ‘Aren’t you the woman who wrote an article called “Why I am ashamed to be a Sikh”?’

It was one of the few moments in my life when I have been really scared. Bhindranwale was in the habit of identifying people he wanted dead at meetings such as this one. If I admitted on this tense, hot afternoon in front of this bunch of hotheaded young Sikh ‘soldiers’ that I had written an article titled ‘Why I am ashamed to be a Sikh’ in
Sunday
magazine, there could be serious trouble. So I dithered.

Bhindranwale repeated his question in an even louder voice.

Finally, as softly as possible, I said, ‘I wrote an article saying that I was ashamed to see so many guns inside the Golden Temple.’

Bhindranwale’s reaction was to flounce off in a rage, after saying loudly, ‘Our Guru has given Sikhs the right to bear arms.’

I was momentarily relieved to see him go but quickly realized that Sandeep and I had to negotiate our way down a narrow flight of stairs. Since I had been identified as someone who had displeased the Sant one of his more reckless followers may try to attack us on the way down. Sandeep seemed to have had the same thought and whispered, as Bhindranwale’s troops began to disperse, that we should wait till everyone had gone.

So we waited till everyone left and walked uneasily down the stairs. I noticed that Harmindar Singh Sandhu, a former student leader and one of Bhindranwale’s closest lieutenants, was standing at the bottom of the stairs. Deciding that aggression was my best defence I said that I thought it was disgraceful that the great Sikh community had come to such a pass that a defenceless woman should be targeted in this way.

He gave me a long, hard stare and said, ‘Let’s just say you are very lucky that you are a woman. I cannot say any more.’

The chance to tell Rajiv about my conversation with the General never came. Two weeks later troops were sent into the Golden Temple. And, despite Kewal Sahib’s best efforts to ensure my presence in Amritsar I was not there when it happened.